Quick Gift

I was invited to a surprise birthday party this week! One sure way to be sure no one ruins the surprise is to wait until Wednesday to plan the surprise for Friday. I wanted to give an actual gift to this friend, not just a card, but I didn't have much time. Quick and fun solution: a Long-Day-At-Work Survival Kit made with some supplies I got while running my Friday afternoon errands!

At Michael's (craft store), I got a blue (the b-day girl's favorite color) bandanna and some blue duct tape. At Target, I got a sewing kit (in case buttons and hems don't stay where they should), safety pins (in case blouses gape or anything else doesn't stay where it should) a Tide pen (in case lunch winds up where it shouldn't), and a bag of Dove Promises chocolate (for chocolate and encouragement, which make any situation better).

Front

I folded the bandanna into an envelope shape with the pretty side on the inside, then coated it with duct tape on the wrong side. I made sure to run a fold of duct tape along the bottom of the envelope so nothing would fall out.

Back

I used some scraps of blue ribbon yarn added to the topmost corner of the envelope as ties. Then I turned the whole thing inside out, which put the pretty side of the bandanna on the outside and the duct tape on the inside.

















I added all the treats (putting the food in a separate pocket from the Tide pen and other items).














 I folded the whole thing over twice, basically rolling it up on itself, then tied it with the ribbon yarn. Finally, I wrote the birthday girl a quick note wishing her a happy birthday and explaining each item. If I'd had more time, it would have been nice to have designed a printable with a pretty picture and the explanations, but I didn't! (As it was, I was a bit late, but the hostess, knowing the lack of timeliness common among our group, invited the birthday girl a to arrive an hour later than the rest of us.

From start to finish (not including the shopping, which was mixed in with my own errands), this whole project probably took me fifteen minutes--a very doable quick gift! I'm already thinking about doing similar gifts for other people with their favorite color bandannas and duct tape, and a theme that fits the person. Maybe a new mom relaxation kit with some lotion, an electric candle (so they don't have to worry about leaving the fire unattended when they fall asleep or go to check on the baby), an easy-to-read paperback, and some tea; a movie night kit with a DVD, candy, and popcorn; a travel kit with a travel toothbrush, small toiletries or toiletry bottles, earplugs, socks, and sleep mask...or just about anything! I think interesting presentation can help even a simple gift communicate loving thoughtfulness.

Improvised Bedside Table: A Before-And-After

I've had fabric-covered boxes as my bedside table for over three years now. It started off as a short-term solution until I found a bedside table I liked better than my boxes. Three years in, however, I still haven't managed to buy a table for beside my bed. I often forget to look for something I could repaint or repurpose, and after all, my boxes are doing just fine--if it ain't broke, don't fix it!

Old fabrics, new fabrics, and bedspread

The boxes had gotten to where they could use a bit of fixing, however. Three years of having damp glasses of water sitting on them, my cat jumping on them, and my vacuum cleaner running into them had made the boxes a bit softer, and the fabric a bit dirtier, than they first were. I laundered and ironed my fabrics, then stopped. My original plan for my bedroom color scheme was pastel pink and blue. As I decorated, however, I found very little pink-and-blue, and lots of pink-and-green. My original table fabrics didn't really match the bedroom, or my bedspread, as well as they could have. I decided to try some other fabrics. I love the pink-with-blue-roses vintage print, but the newer pink and green roses really do look better with my bedspread.



I had a few boxes I had saved from some shipments I received at work, so I tried stacking them in different ways. This is the arrangement I went with. If I'd had larger pieces of fabric to work with, I could have covered two same-size boxes with a single fabric, but most of my fabric is scraps from dressmaking, so I don't have pieces that large! The shape of this "table" reminds me of some 1950s vintage wooden end tables my parents have in their living room. I've always liked those tables.










Here are the fabric-covered boxes. I covered the top one tightly with the printed fabric, then decided to drape the fabric over the lower one a bit more loosely, sort of like a tablecloth, only tucked underneath at the edges. I used plain straight pins to secure the printed fabric to the smaller box. They stay pretty well in the thick corrugated cardboard of the box.

Here's the final product! I added a small metal tray to the top to help support the weight of my lamp and such, and to help protect the cardboard from future damp water glasses!

Necklaces and Not-Wreaths

I made some necklaces for Christmas presents...

And, for my mom, I made some chair-back wreaths for her dining room chairs.  Except they're not really wreaths.  I guess they're more chair-back flowers.  I glued a hydrangea head to some hydrangea leaves, then added a pin back.

These are pinned to dark burgundy ribbons knotted around the chair backs.  It looks pretty nice, and it will be good for any time of year!  I'm adding some ribbon loops of different colors for each different season as a finishing touch.  Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of them at my parents' house!

UFO To the Rescue!

My dad's side of the family always gets together on Christmas Eve for dinner and an ornament exchange, done White Elephant/Yankee Swap/Dirty Santa style. I'd gotten two beautiful little bird ornaments from World Market, only to drop one on a tile floor the day before Christmas Eve. Well, I'm not crazy enough to want to go shopping at that point in the season, but I did want to have more than just one tiny ornament.

UnFinished Object stash to the rescue! I had a few ornaments I'd started a few years ago but never finished, so I just finished one, and had a very nice replacement ornament at the last minute. I know it's now after Christmas, but in case any of you are ever in a similar situation, here's what you do.

1) Make yo-yos out of gold (or whatever color) lame' (foil) fabric. I did all these the hard way, but they now have yo-yo makers that make this part a lot easier.
2) Glue the yo-yos to a styrofoam ball. You may have to squish some of them to make them all fit nicely, but that's pretty easy to do.
3) Glue pearl beads to the center of each yo-yo, as well as to any spots where the styrofoam shows, such as the intersectionswhere three yo-yos come together.
4) Glue a ribbon hanger to the top.

That's it! I used hot glue for everything, so it was pretty quick to put together.

I'll post more about what I did over the Christmas holidays as I have the chance.

Christmas Prep

First off, I learned last night that candles and ceiling fans don't mix. The votive candle was fine, but the red candle burned out, and the white candle leaked wax all over the plate. Looks like the plate will be spending some time in the freezer...but I think I won't worry about it until time to take down the Christmas decorations.






I have a friend spending Christmas with us, so I made her a quick stocking from some scrap fabric I had. I traced around one of the stockings I already had, sewed the black part together, then added the cuff, then topstitched it to secure the inside, and turned the cuff over. Only then did I realize I had no way of hanging the stocking!









No worries, though--I used a bit of ribbon stuck on with a safety pin. Yes, this is probably the most rapidly-put-together stocking in the history of stockings, but it will do the job!










It's finished! I don't love the shape, but it pretty much matches the stockings I already had, so I guess that's okay.



But now that it has a hanging loop, I still have no stocking holder for it. That's why I love Command hooks. I laid one on the shelf and hooked the stocking to it. Nice invisible stocking hanger!



Just so you know, glass ornaments and tile floors don't mix. I was taking the price tags off the pair of pretty little bird ornaments I had gotten for the family ornament exchange when I dropped one. It bounced, then shattered. Sad. I was going to go and get a replacement, but I didn't really want to go shopping two days before Christmas. Then I remembered some partially-made ornaments I'd found in my projects-in-progress when I was organizing my craft room.

You take a styrofoam ball, yo-yos made from gold lame, and some pearl beads. The trusty hot glue gun is, of course, a given.

Stick the yo-yos to the ball, then put a pearl in the center of each one, as well as the intersections where 3 yo-yos come together.











Add a ribbon hanger, and you have a pretty, sparkly ornament!












Here's the Christmas tree corner the way it looks now--three stockings and lots of presents!

I didn't have labels, so I made some out of stamped cardstock.  Some are tag-shaped, and some are diamonds.  I hung some on with ribbon, and just taped others.  I'm really pleased with how they came out!  That said, I'll be sure to get some tags at the after-Christmas sales.  I don't always have time enough to make something creative for every single gift I'm giving!

A Little Christmas

I've finally done my first bit of Christmas decorating! Well, I'm not sure if you could really call it decorating yet. It's a single candle and wreath in one of the four windows on the front of my house. As you can see, I didn't even get it really centered. That's okay, though, because the wreath is going to have to come inside to get a bow put on it once I borrow the bow maker from my mom this weekend. It's just that I'd gone as far as I could with all my other Christmas crafting, and wanted to see how this would look. I've never hung wreaths out a window before, but it was actually pretty simple.

Step 1: Fluff wreath. These wreaths were squished pretty flat, but it looks pretty good now that it's nice and fluffy.

Step 2: Cut ribbon. You need twice the distance between the top of your window and the inside of the top of your wreath, plus a foot or two for going around the wreath and inside the window.

Step 3: Remove screen from window. Also something I've never done before. When you live in Florida, the only month you can guarantee you won't want to open the windows is probably January, and if the screens aren't in the windows, you'll wind up with a house full of bugs. My screens have tabs at the bottom on the inside, and it came right out when I pulled on the tabs. I'll have to look carefully at the next one so I can figure out how to put them back in when I take the wreaths down!

Step 4: Open the window from the top, loop the ribbon around the wreath, and toss the wreath out the window. Close the window with the ends of the ribbon caught between the window and the window casing. It seems to close tightly enough to hold everything in place!

Looking at the picture, you can see the screen that I haven't yet put away, and you can tell that the wreath isn't centered yet. Both of those will probably happen Monday, since the weekend is pretty busy. That's also when I'll add a bow to the wreath, and hopefully duplicate this in all the other windows. I think the candle could stand to be taller, but I don't have four of anything for them to stand on. Besides which, once the bow is at the top of the wreath (I'm usually a bow-at-the-bottom person, but that would put the visual center way too low on the window), the "flame" of the candle will be just about at the middle of where you can see, which will probably be fine. After I do all that, I'll have another first on Tuesday--putting lights on the eaves of the house! My sister is helping with that, and she's actually done it before. Hopefully it works out!

I, Ironman, take you, Pepper Potts...

This is another portion of the gift that included the embroidered dish towels. The whole gift (towels, an Ironman nightlight, and some gift cards) was "wrapped" in a set of graduated round boxes, painted white, trimmed with ribbon, and stacked on top of each other to look like a cake. The cake topper was this bride and groom set. The groom is slightly obsessed with Ironman (and just happens to look a good bit like Tony Stark in the Ironman movies). Not only that, but the bride also has red hair! So I got these little peg people at the craft store and painted them to look like the bride and groom. The bride's dress looks an awful lot like her actual dress, and the groom's cummerbund and bow tie match the color they will actually be. The last detail--a little glowing blue circle right where Ironman glows! Once I finished all my painting, I sprayed them with clear sealant.

Word to the wise: once you've sprayed them a few times and you're ready to let them dry overnight, put them somewhere that they will be disturbed by neither cats nor wind. My cat was always a little too interested in the little peg people, so I put them outside to dry, where they got blown over by the wind, messing up the finish and forcing me to sand it down, re-paint, and respray! Grr....But I like the way the finished product turned out. Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of the boxes, either before or after they were finished and assembled into cake-shape. But the bride was pleased, and that's what counts!

Things Gotta Get Dried...The Towel Might As Well Be Pretty

You saw the mess in my previous entry. Now that the gift is safely given, I can post the process of turning the mess into something pretty!

Don't make fun of me--some of my favorite things in my kitchen are the flour sack towels that I embroidered a few years back. I got some pretty transfers of fruits and vegetables and used a stem stitch to outline a different fruit or vegetable on each corner of the towels. It took a while, but it was fun. So when it came time to find a small gift to include as part of a bridal shower present, I decided to hie me to Target to get some white flour sack towels. I didn't have a chance to get to a craft shop that sells embroidery transfers, however, so I decided to look online.

I found this website, which has tons of downloadable hand embroidery designs. There were many other sites, as well--just google it.

I printed the pattern twice on the page, a bit smaller than the original size. It looked like the pattern was meant to be done with french knots--the lines were made up of small dots. I had no intention of making that many french knots (besides which, I don't think that texture would be very good for drying dishes), so I went over the pattern on the right with a black pen. I then realized that the designs on the right and left wings are just slightly different, so I color-coded the pattern on the left using red and blue pens. This was a lot of help!

The transfer process: I didn't have a transfer pencil (a pencil you trace onto the paper, then iron onto the fabric), and my fabric-marking pen was fresh out of ink, so I used a pencil and my own version of a light box. After ironing the corner I wanted to embroider onto, I put the fabric into the embroidery hoop upside down (so the tight-stretched fabric was flat against the table. My coffee table is glass, so I put a lamp underneath, laid my pattern down with the towel on top, and traced away! I flipped the light off periodically to be sure I was actually tracing all the lines.

The pattern traced onto the towel. It wasn't nearly as dark as it looks in this photo. Also, stem stitch is pretty wide, and pencil washes out well, so I wasn't concerned about any marks showing.

The right side of the finished towel, right before laundering. See, no visible marks.

The wrong side of the embroidery. With something like a towel, that doesn't necessarily get hung up perfectly after every use, I like to be sure the wrong side is just as neat as the right side. It means you waste a bit more thread, but it looks better, and it keeps fingers and forks from accidentally catching on threads that were carried from one area to another.

I washed them again, ironed them, wrapped them in tissue, and put them into the box they were going to occupy. I'll tell more about the gift (this isn't all of it!) later.

Strawberry Topping

One of my favorite late-night snacks to make is strawberry topping. I love to have it on ice cream, but today I had no ice cream, only the last few slices of a store-bought angel food cake. Aren't you sorry for me?

This time I made it with frozen strawberries, but it's great with fresh berries or frozen berries of any sort. Step one is to boil the berries. Well, I should clarify that. Tonight, my first step was to dump a couple handsful of strawberries and some sugar into the pot and set it to boiling. In the past, I have occasionally tried caramelizing the sugar first, but it didn't seem to make much difference in the flavor, so I don't usually do that. You can leave the sugar out, if you like--after all, berries tend to be sweet, and you'll probably be using this sauce to top something else sweet. You can also experiment with white sugar, brown sugar, honey, or whatever other sweeteners you like.

I tend to let it go at a pretty strong boil for a while--you want to break down the cells of the berries so they're easier to smash. You also want to get rid of some of the water, so the sauce thickens up. (Remember, it will also thicken some as it cools.) Once the berries begin to break down, I use a fork or a potato masher to squash the berries. I like my sauce pretty lumpy, with large chunks of strawberry, but you may want it smoother, depending on your purposes. I'm sure an immersion blender, regular blender, or food processor would also work well!

When the sauce is almost at the thickness and smoothness you want, you can toast your angelfood cake, if that's what you're using the topping for. It's absolutely not necessary, but it's a nice touch. I often add a bit of vanilla or almond extract to the sauce at this point, but, again, it's not a necessary step.

Spoon the sauce over your cake, ice cream, or whatever else, and enjoy!  (I apologize for the dark color of the sauce in this photo--it was night time and apparently my lighting wasn't quite up to par.)

A Memo Board...of Sorts

You have probably seen rag garland tutorials somewhere in the last couple years. I didn't find out they existed until last year, but I thought the whole idea was a bit too "country" for my decorating tastes. Recently, however, I decided to make a small one to hang in my laundry room. I was going to add some clothespins on ribbons to it and make it something of a fancy-looking, decorative clothesline--a place to hang the "unmentionables" to dry. I had read several tutorials for the rag garlands, and every one of them said to tear TONS of rag strips--"you'll need more than you think," they all boldly proclaimed. Well, when you think you need several tons, but your garland is under three feet long, you may wind up with an extra ton of rag strips! What to do with them? The obvious answer is to make a rag wreath for your bedroom, and to add clothespins to the wreath to make it a memo board!

I'm not going to write a tutorial on how to make a rag wreath--you can google "rag garland" and get about two bazillion hits. To turn the garland into a wreath, just bend a wire hanger into a circle and use it as the base you tie your rag strips around. At first I tried to keep all the strips lying flat, but then I decided that made the wreath look...flat. So I just fluffed and twisted and pulled until most of the strips were coming forward and the wreath looked properly three-dimensional.  (This photo is pre-fluffing.)

I was originally going to spray paint the clothespins white. While I was waiting to get a chance to do that, however, I saw some stamped clothespins. What a great idea--make the clothespins pretty!  I used pink and green ink pads and stamped with a variety of floral images. Some were wide stamps, so I held several clothespins together and stamped them at once. You could also try spray painting, then stamping, or even overstamping different colors and patterns onto a single clothespin.

Once my clothespins were pretty, I arranged them on the wreath (I decided I wanted half to face in and half to face out) and dumped out my stash of narrow pink ribbons. For those who like numbers, my wreath form (or wire hanger circle) is about a foot in diameter, and I used ten clothespins. If I were to make this again, I might increase it to an even dozen clothespins. The ribbons I wound up liking best were about 1/4 inch to 3/4 inch. Eighth-inch ribbon was just too skimpy (although it might be fine if you used two or three strands), and wider ribbons didn't blend as well.

I tied a piece of ribbon around the wreath (just like the rags), put a clothespin on top, and put the ribbon ends through the clothespin. In the picture below it's done very loosely, but of course I snugged it up tight to the clothespin spring. Once the clothespin was pinching the ribbon, I double-knotted the ribbon ends on top of the clothespin. I experimented with the ribbon length a bit, but I decided I wanted the ribbon tails just a bit shorter than my rag ends, so I cut my ribbons about the same length as the rag strips. (The extra knots took up a little length, resulting in ribbons just slightly shorter than rags.)

Next, I rescued the ribbons from my feline helper/inspector.

Once all the clothespins were tied on, I added one last loop of ribbon for hanging, then stuck it to the wall with a small Command hook. I love those, by the way. They prevent my commitment-fearing self from having to put holes in the wall until I'm sure I like the wall arrangement!

(The flowers in the paper cone were on clearance this summer at Pier 1 for less than it would have cost me to purchase the flowers alone!)

Closeup of the beribboned clothespins.  I'm liking my new "memo wreath"!